1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique for supporting layout design, including the arrangement of a building and a plurality of equipments within a layout range space of a plant and connections between the equipments, using a computer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Layout design of various types of plant facilities, such as chemical plants and power plants for generating thermal power, nuclear power, hydropower, and so on, is performed on a plant design enterprise side when providing a price estimate or at an early stage of the design process, and encompasses concepts such as the arrangement of buildings, equipments, piping, cables, and so on, for example. This layout design process must be performed in accordance with various conditions relating to the design content and various industry-related conditions. Hereafter, these conditions will be divided broadly into “conditions for arranging objects within a given site”, “conditions for preventing effects on the exterior of the site”, and “estimate operation conditions”.
[Conditions for Arranging Objects within a Given Site]
Firstly, a design which ensures that all of the required facilities are accommodated within the given site is prerequisite. Further, to reduce costs, economic efficiency and work ability must be taken sufficiently into consideration. Customer procurement specifications and the law must also be taken sufficiently into account.
More specifically, in the layout design of a power plant concept, the size of the main equipments and the size of auxiliary equipments selected to correspond to the main equipments are determined by means of heat balance design in accordance with fluid information relating to pressure, temperature, and so on, which is described in the customer procurement specifications. When the main equipments and auxiliary equipments are purchased from an external vendor, the size of the equipments must be determined on the basis of the equipment catalog of the vendor.
In either case, the construction costs for constructing a building for housing the equipments increases in accordance with the surface are a of the equipments. Therefore, the size of each equipment must be made as small as possible, the arrangement are a must be reduced as far as possible, and the dimensions of the building must be reduced. Construction costs also rise when the structure of the building is complicated or unique, and therefore it is also important to make the structure of the building as easy to construct as possible.
Further, route design relating to the paths taken by the pipes and cables that connect the equipments must be performed with regard to the sizes and positions of the buildings and equipments, as well as external interference relating to prepared lines for electricity, water supply and sewerage, fuel, and so on. Simultaneously, to achieve reductions in the amount of material and construction costs, the piping and cables must be designed to be as short as possible, preferably taking the shortest route between equipments. The reason for this is as follows.
For example, main steam pipes which are capable of withstanding high temperatures and high-pressure, power cables which are capable of withstanding high voltages, and so on are extremely expensive, and hence when the length of the piping and cables increases, the amount of material rises, leading to cost increases. In particular, when the distance of a cable increases, more expensive cable must be selected to prevent the effects of voltage drop, and it is therefore extremely important to reduce the cable distance. Likewise with respect to the construction of steel structures known as piping racks and cable racks, which are used during installation of the piping and cable, and the excavation work required to lay the piping and create cable trenches, costs rise as the distance increases.
In reality, however, piping and cable are almost never designed to take the shortest route between equipments. The reason for this is that during piping and cable route design, accessibility, ease of maintenance, and the construction sequence must be taken into account in addition to distance. For example, when a road or operating frame exists on the shortest route, route design must be performed so as to avoid these obstacles. Furthermore, the design of routes on which piping racks or trenches are formed must be prioritized over other routes. In particular, when a trench orbits the outer periphery of the plant, the total amount of material is greatly affected, and therefore such routes must be avoided if at all possible.
[Conditions for Preventing Effects on the Exterior of the Site]
In addition to the conditions relating to the interior of the given site, it is also important that the design prevents effects on the exterior of the site. More specifically, when the plant is operative, a considerable amount of vibration and noise is typically generated, and hence sufficient consideration must be given to ways of preventing the vibration and noise from affecting the environment on the exterior of the site. With respect to environmental problems, laws and ordinances differ according to the country and region, similarly to other laws, and hence design must be performed in accordance with the laws and ordinances of the subject country and region.
Particularly with respect to the sound pressure level, an upper sound pressure level limit on the boundary between the site and the site exterior or the like may be set, and hence design must be performed such that these sound pressure level conditions are satisfied. Therefore, measures such as removing the equipments that serve as noise sources from the boundary with the site exterior and providing protective walls around the equipments must also be taken.
[Estimate Operation Conditions]
In addition to conditions on the design content of the layout design, many constraints are applied to layout design as an estimate operation due to the fact that layout design is positioned at the beginning of the multi-stage design process involved in plant design. Firstly, the short amount of time that can be spent on the design acts as a large constraint. In other words, the time that can be spent on the estimate to be tendered is short, and at the same time a large number of items must be dealt with. Moreover, since the layout design is positioned at the head of the design process, speed is required to issue precise instructions to downstream departments.
Furthermore, the information that can be used during the design stage is limited, and therefore work must be performed to compensate for the lack of information. For example, various operations other than the actual layout design, such as comparison with time-tested plants and organization of the information confirmed at that time, must be performed to optimize the layout design.
[Known Examples Relating to Plant Design]
Known examples relating to plant design include Japanese Unexamined Patent Application H6-314310, which discloses a plant design support system used in a functional layout design of a plant and a simulation of an optimum operation plan for the plant, both of which are upstream processes of plant design. Typically, many conventional techniques relating to layout design involve plant operation simulations, and Japanese Unexamined Patent Application H6-301546, for example, discloses artificial intelligence software for use in a plant operation simulation.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Application 2002-251414 mentions a technique enabling a plant user and a designer to efficiently plan the addition of a denitrification apparatus. However, this technique does not relate to layout design.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Application H10-124566 and Japanese Unexamined Patent Application H9-305643 disclose a technique serving as a plant design tool, in which a plant arrangement optimization calculation is performed by setting a specific equipment arrangement and logical connections between the equipments using a three-dimensional model.
In the conventional plant design-related techniques described above, problems such as the following exist. First, when used as an estimation tool, layout design support means nothing more than providing a database of plant design conditions or the like, and support is not provided up to the detailed layout design process. Japanese Unexamined Patent Application H10-124566 and Japanese Unexamined Patent Application H9-305643 describe setting of the arrangement of the equipments and the logical connections therebetween, but make no mention of the arrangement of buildings, setting of the physical connections between equipments, and so on, which affect the amount of materials and cost during construction.
As described above, design of the specific routes taken by the piping, cables and so on which connect the equipments to each other greatly affects the amount of materials and cost during construction, and hence it is important to take these conditions into account during specific route design. However, in the conventional techniques, only logical equipment connections are considered, and support is not provided in relation to specific route design taking the necessary conditions into account. As a result, specific route design places a large load on the designer, and it is difficult to produce an optimum route design. Sine it is difficult to produce an optimum route design during the layout design process, accurate calculation of the total amount of materials and cost also becomes difficult.
Further, to obtain a spatial grasp of the arrangement of the equipments, visual expression thereof is preferably performed using a two-dimensional CAD drawing or a three-dimensional CAD model. However, when a design operation is performed using a two-dimensional CAD or three-dimensional CAD, the layout design workload is much greater than that a case in which simple, universal diagrams are used.
In any case, the work required for a plant design estimate operation has been increasing by the year. The main reason for this is that a large number of items must be dealt with in order to respond to inquiries, and yet the scope of supply for each individual plant has widened and new, unknown technology must be dealt with. Due to the concentrated nature of the estimate operation, in which a large amount of work must be performed within a short time period, oversights relating to the customer procurement specifications and errors caused by misunderstandings may occur, creating the possibility for significant estimate omissions. Hence, to avoid the large risks involved in layout design as an estimate operation, the workload required for layout design must be lightened.